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Comment by rabf | Hacker News Reader

ATI drivers were a horror show for the longest time on windows never mind linux. What Nvidia did was have have basically the same driver code for all operating systems with a compatibility shim. If you were using any sort of professioinal 3d software over the previous 2 decades Nvidia were the only viable solution.

Source: Was burned by ATI, Matrox, 3dlabs before finallly coughing up the cash for Nvidia.

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I was a big Matrox fan, mostly because I knew someone there, and was able to upgrade their products at a significant discount. This was important for me as a teenager whose only source of income was power washing eighteen-wheelers and their associated semi-trailers. It was a dirty and somewhat dangerous job, but I fondly remember my first job. Anyway, I digress, so let's get back to the topic of Matrox cards.

The MGA Millennium had unprecedented image quality, and its RAMDAC was in a league of its own. The G200 had the best 3D image quality when it was released, but it was really slow and somewhat buggy outside of Direct3D where it shined. However, even with my significant discount and my fanboyism, when the G400 was released, I defected to NVIDIA since its relative performance was abysmal.

One usecase Matrox kept doing well was X11 multimonitor desktops. The G400 era was about the time I was drifting away from games and moving to full time Linux, so they suited me at least.

yes, i am very familiar with that pain. fglrx was hell compared to nvidia.

nvidia being the only viable solution for 3d on linux is a bit of an exaggeration imo (source: i did it for 5 years), but that was a long time ago: we have amdgpu, which is far superior to nvidia’s closed source driver.

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